Selling computer software for home and business applications is a major market. In the retail market, competition is fierce in getting a program, sometimes called titles, before a consumer to be considered in the purchasing decision. Shelf space for new titles is extremely limited and every title for every publisher simply cannot be displayed. Consequently, software publishers look for other channels that can be used to get titles before consumers.
One of the other channels used by software publishers or manufacturers is direct advertising in computer publications. Another channel is direct marketing to potential consumers of computer software. However, accurate information about the programs is difficult to obtain through these channels. For example, the advertising copy may concentrate on the features provided by the software and, because space is limited, not disclose all the hardware and support software required for executing the advertised program. A review of the program requirements when the user orders the software or views its packaging at a retail outlet may form an impression within the consumer that the manufacturer's advertising was merely hype. This, in turn, may lead the consumer to view advertising information for all software products with a measure of skepticism.
In an effort to fully inform the potential purchaser about the program being offered, some manufacturers offer demonstration versions of their products. These demonstration versions may contain prepared examples of the capabilities of the offered software or they may contain a fully operational version with a time deactivation feature. The time deactivation feature permits the program to execute for only a limited time following its installation. In this manner, the consumer is able to test all of the features of the software, the ease in which the consumer can use the software, and the compatibility of the output of the software with other application programs which the consumer uses on their system. To disable the time deactivation feature, the consumer must purchase the software to obtain the commands for disabling the time deactivation feature or to receive a copy of the software without the time deactivation feature.
While demonstration software more fully informs consumers about the capability and user friendliness of the software, it does suffer from an important limitation--timelines. Many consumers are more likely to make a purchasing decision favorable to the seller if they are presented the product when the consumer's interest is active. If the demonstration version of the program is shipped on a diskette, the consumer may be busy when it arrives and simply never attempt to install the demonstration version for evaluation. Additionally, the consumer may have become aware of another software product or forthcoming development which the consumer thinks better addresses the consumer's need. Thus, the opportunity to favorably impress a consumer may have evaporated by the time the demonstration software has been placed in the hands of the consumer.
To make software available more quickly, some manufacturers have made their demonstration software available through downloading facilities. To obtain a copy of the software, the consumer's computer system communicates with the download facility so that a copy of the program may be transferred through a modem and over a telephone line to a modem associated with the consumer's system. While this approach reduces the time between the consumer's request for the software and its delivery, it still requires the consumer to contact the download facility for a copy of the program in response to advertising in a publication. Since the consumer's computer may not be accessible at the time that the publication is read, the consumer's interest may wane before she uses her computer system again.
A promising environment which appears to address many of the timing problems for the marketing of software is the Internet. The Internet is a publicly available network of computer networks that spans, not only the United States, but many parts of the world as well. To access the information on the Internet, a user uses a computer coupled to the Internet through an Internet server. These servers include programs which support the physical, data link, network and transport layers necessary for communication among the servers on the Internet. In this way, computers on a network associated with one server may communicate with a computer associated with another server and the messages between the computers may be relayed by intervening servers.
The importance of the Internet as a commercial marketplace was enhanced by the development of the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). This protocol is implemented with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). By using HTTP, documents written in HTML containing images and text may be presented on a server coupled to the Internet. The presented documents may then be retrieved and their contents graphically displayed. To peruse the HTML documents available through the servers of the Internet, a user's computer uses an application program called a browser. The browser communicates with servers using HTML and HTTP to request, retrieve, and display HTML documents on a user's computer. Such browsers may also retrieve a HTML document for storage on a user's system. Thus, a server on the Internet may present information about a software program in a graphical manner that is as impressive as any print ad and also support a download of the program to the user's system in response to a user's request for a demonstration program. Thus, the viewing of the information that raises a user's interest in a program is contemporaneous with the user's receipt of the program.
While the Internet, HTTP and HTML provide a commercially viable marketplace for software advertising and product demonstration, there are still limitations that restrain the effectiveness of this type of marketing once the consumer leaves the manufacturer's server site with the demonstration product. For one, the consumer must still install the demonstration product on the consumer's computer system. To do this, the consumer must still be knowledgeable about the hardware and software for his computer system to respond to the information prompts generated by the installation program for the demonstration product. This information includes knowledge about system memory, operating system version, monitor display size and video capability. As a result, the consumer may not be able to install the demonstration program properly and the program may abort its execution as a result. Just as unproductive, the consumer may become so frustrated during the installation procedure that he simply postpones the activation of the program and there is no way of ensuring the consumer later activates the program for the demonstration. Even if the consumer installs the program with relative ease, the consumer's unfamiliarity with the capabilities of the demonstrated program may lead the user to improperly evaluate the program. All of these possibilities negatively impact the likelihood that a consumer will make a decision to purchase the software.
One way to overcome the limitations still present in the Internet environment is to provide the user with access to the application program without requiring the user to execute the program in her own computer system. Allowing a user to remotely control an application on another computer coupled through a network is known in the software support and maintenance environment. Such remote control permits a technician located at a customer service site to execute the application program on a customer's computer from a remote location to try and duplicate the problem the customer is experiencing or to examine certain parameters in the program to ascertain resource problems which may be causing the customer's problems. Normally, the remote access to the customer's computer is through a modem and telephone line. That is, the communication is from one point, the service site, to the other point, the customer's computer. Other remote control programs may control an application executing on another computer over a network. One example of a protocol which supports such remote control over a network is the X protocol. In this type of control, communication between the controlling and controlled computers is not necessarily point to point.
Remote control programs, both network and point-to-point which are currently known, require a component of the remote control program to be resident on both computers. That is, the components necessary to support remote control must be installed on both computers prior to any attempt to control one of the computers remotely. Installation of the program to support remote control requires a consumer knowledgeable about her system parameters or a technician of the service company who possesses the requisite knowledge. The system parameters and local resources include the input/output (I/O) components of the system which, along with the corresponding support software, form the user interface to the computer system. These resources include a mouse, keyboard, monitor and communication ports.
What is needed is a remote control program that does not require pre-installation in order to operate.
What is needed is a way to provide potential customers with on-demand access to an application program without requiring the user to download and install the program on the user's system.
What is needed is a way to use the Internet or other network to transparently provide demonstration software.